Pet Sematary TV Spot Reveals the Terrifying New Zelda – /Film

There’s a new Pet Sematary TV spot, and while it’s only 15 seconds long, that’s more than enough time to give you the creeps. Directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer are adapting Stephen King‘s most terrifying novel for a whole new generation, and from the looks of things, this movie is going to freak audiences out in the best possible way. Watch the new Pet Sematary TV spot below, which offers us our first look at the Zelda, one of the scariest characters from both the book and the previous movie adaptation.

Pet Sematary TV Spot

Anyone who has seen the 1989 adaptation of Pet Sematary can tell you that Zelda is scary as hell. Even if you found the rest of the movie to be unimpressive, the scenes where Zelda – the dead sister of lead character Rachel Creed – pops up with her twisted back are the stuff of nightmares. The character was equally disturbing in King’s novel, and now, a new Zelda is set to traumatize audiences with 2019’s Pet Sematary.

This Pet Sematary TV spot gives us our first real look at the new Zelda, in all her back-twisted glory. It’s a quick moment, but it’s suitably effective, thanks in part to the nasty twisting sounds emanating from Zelda as she crawls across the floor. In the story, Zelda died from spinal meningitis, and her horrible, painful demise scarred Rachel Creed (played by Amy Seimetz in the new movie) for life, giving her a severe phobia of death.

In the 1989 movie, Zelda was played by an actor (Andrew Hubatsek), covered in make-up. For the new film, the character is played by 13-year-old actress Alyssa Brooke Levine, and the filmmakers are taking a different approach. I visited the set of Pet Sematary last year, and director Dennis Widmyer gave me some details on the new Zelda.

“[Zelda is] an 11- or 10-year-old girl with a debilitating disease in bed,” Widmyer said. “So if you look at the psychology of the Zelda situation – it’s a family that was dealing with a horrible situation that had a daughter that they couldn’t fix, that was wasting away up in their bedroom, and they had a younger daughter [Rachel] who was in charge of basically like going in and taking care of her and being there as she disintegrated. That in itself is pretty horrific.”

Widmyer also revealed to me that when he and co-director Kevin Kölsch came aboard the film, the script didn’t have Zelda. The filmmakers immediately insisted the character be added into the film. “We came along and said you have to have Zelda,” Widmyer said. “And then we just sort of accepted the challenge and said we gotta try to do something on our own and do something that honors the book but is our own thing, which is just as scary if not scarier than they did in the first one.”

As a huge fan of the novel (it’s my favorite King book), I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about all of this. Pet Sematary opens April 5, 2019.